when i watch such things for research purposes, i like to do it at home on a computer where i can pause, pray, fast-forward, rewind... etc... and am not at the mercy of the projectionists whim. i recently view the movie on putlocker and did find the similarities very compelling. the sad news is that this side of the marvel universe is preaching that "mutation" is inevitable and "ascension" a directive of the species to propel us towards an "evolutionary leap" which will greatly benefit mankind.

though they don't dive into too much of the backstory of apocalypse, they do hit the main points home. That he is "The One" to help mankind is a given, although he does it in a horrible way, similar to the black christ of satanism and other such antichrist movements. if it is a shadow of nimrod, it's an easy stretch. in the marvel universe, he is easily the shadow and type of satan.

strangely, marvel (the actual comic company) is one of the most transparent corporations to show the power and glory of God. in power rating lists, there is a YHWH portrayal called "one-above-all", there is a Jesus Christ portrayal called "the beyonder, and there is a Holy Spirit character called "living tribunal." the representations came at a time where marvel really was ministering to a lost and hurting audience. they have changed for the worse in the crossover mediums.

"one-above-all", with eyes as white hot embers, "beyonder", being born in human likeness after realizing his true mission only to be killed by mankind, and "living tribunal" with a multitude of hidden faces so as to judge with impunity all were created, i believe, with a divine plan. even the fourth most powerful being, "eternity" shows Gods glory in the comics... but then again, evil monsters with bible parallels sell a little better.

apocalypse is shown to be "the first mutant" which is a way of saying that for the mutants who need help and love and a leader in this "brave new world" we should look towards the true future of the race and embrace this change. in the movie he has four horsemen (sound familiar)... one of them is "angel" if you remember him, and rids the world of all of it's "false gods." it is a very prophetic telling of the prophetic rise of the "man of sin" as mentioned in the new testament.

"In the harsh, unforgiving desert of ancient Egypt, ruled by Rama-Tut, a band of nomadic raiders found an infant, gray-skinned and freakish in appearance, abandoned by the settlers of Akkaba. The nomads took the child for their own, giving him the name En Sabah Nur, 'The First One,'"

and

"He was also known to have traveled around the world during these ancient years, appearing to various primitive cultures as their death god. At some point, when traveling through Mongolia, Apocalypse encountered a spaceship abandoned by the planet-judging aliens, the Celestials. His travels then became fueled by a single-minded purpose-- to find the key that would unlock the secrets to this alien technology." -Marvel. com

so. watch this movie at your discretion, i would recommend it, but then again i also recommend not giving money to the parent company, walt disney, who has proven to be anti-christ.

Following the logic of dictionary.com we, as Christians should believe in the earth and not The Earth, for the earth is earth and earth is the earth. When an athiest says: "The Earth", they refer to a specific fictitious place in their mind as a ball floating around, just as important as Sol or Jupiter. But, since there is but one place we live, it is earth, then let it be "earth"

Genesis 1:1 says: "אָ֫רֶץ" when it says "בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית בָּרָ֣א אֱלֹהִ֑ים אֵ֥ת הַשָּׁמַ֖יִם וְאֵ֥ת הָאָֽרֶץ׃" or "In the beginning Elohim created the heavens and the land". Most translations say "The Earth" (even the so-called incorruptible King James Version. Instead, I will chose to call it what Moses called it: "land" or "earth". Below is the following rule from Dictionary.com. Remember, they are speaking of a place that does not exist and therefore has a specific proper name instead of the truth which is: "this is land, here and no other place in the universe is there land but here and so let's call it: earth, because it is".

Below is a quote from Dictionary.com

"When it comes to writing, this common English word confuses many native speakers who aren’t sure whether to use Earth or earth. Why is this an issue? Earth can be either a proper noun or a common noun. In English, proper nouns (nouns which signify a particular person, place, or thing) are capitalized. Following this rule, when Earth is discussed as a specific planet or celestial body, it is capitalized: It takes six to eight months to travel from Earth to Mars. When Earth is a proper noun, the is usually omitted."

The Obama administration, in a far-reaching effort to improve the lot of workers that has ignited criticism from business groups, announced on Tuesday that it was making millions more employees eligible for overtime pay.

This is terrible news for summer camps.

fair pay for the young adults working means the camp hires less. the ratio of counselors to campers grow. the counselors are exhausted. the children are unhappy. the safety meetings and buddy checks lapse. more accidents occur. the camp relies on more seasoned veterans to be counselors. the ones who return enjoy the power trip and not loving the children. the camp calls for volunteers, who sometimes come and sometimes don't, making it harder on rely on them and thus causing more problems. the problem mom comes every day and demands to teach every clinic her son is in and the child is miserable. the counselors-in-training are made more busy and less time for personal growth. sounds like government interfering with our life.

as a personal example from my life, i was a counselor at a small christian camp in the midwest in 1988 and they split the "offering" among all the workers that the parents gave at the saturday morning goodbye celebration. once i got paid $2.40 that week. there is no typo there. i was happy and i learned a great deal as a person who worked 70 hours a week for 5 weeks.

“It's WW2 and there are wage controls in place. Instead of health care, companies decide to offer employees shoes. Having absorbed those costs, they later lobby for every company to be required to offer shoes. That calls forth regulation and monopolization of the shoe industry. Shoes are heavily subsidized. Every shoe must be approved. Producers must be domestic. They must adhere to a certain quality. They can't discriminate based on foot size or individual need. Prices rise, and some people lack shoes, so the Affordable Shoe Act forces everyone to buy into an official shoe plan or pay a fee. Here we have a perfect plan for making shoes egregiously expensive. The entire country would be consumed with the fear of being shoeless if they lose their job. The left wing calls for a single shoe provider to offer universal shoes and the right wing meekly suggests that shoe makers be permitted to sell across state lines. Meanwhile, libertarians suggest that we just forget the whole thing and let the market make and deliver shoes of every quality to anyone from anyone. Everyone screams that this is an insane and dangerous idea.” ― Jeffrey Tucker

Under the new regulation to be issued by the Labor Department on Wednesday, most salaried workers earning up to $47,476 a year must receive time-and-a-half overtime pay when they work more than 40 hours during a week. The previous cutoff for overtime pay, set in 2004, was $23,660.

“This is a big deal to be able to help that many working people without Congress having to pass a new law,” said Ross Eisenbrey of the Economic Policy Institute, an early voice in urging the administration to take up the issue. “It’s really restoring rights that people had for decades and lost.”

The change is expected to play out in a variety of ways. Once the rule goes into effect on Dec. 1, many workers will receive more pay when they work overtime, but others may end up working fewer hours if employers move to limit their time at work. In other cases, employers may decide to increase the salaries of some workers to push them over the cutoff so that the employers will not have to pay overtime or hire additional workers after limiting hours for existing employees.

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who will travel to Columbus, Ohio, on Wednesday to promote the new rules, said they touched on a core issue for Mr. Obama — ensuring that middle-class workers are treated fairly.

“The middle class is getting clobbered,” Mr. Biden told reporters. “If you work overtime, you should actually get paid for working overtime.”

“For the past 40 years, overtime protections have been increasingly weakened,” Mr. Biden added, noting that more than 60 percent of salaried workers qualified for overtime in 1975 based on their salaries, but only 7 percent do today.

Opponents argued that the measure could cost billions of dollars and would undermine the morale of salaried employees by requiring them to account for every hour of their workdays.

“This is an extreme revision in the white-collar threshold,” said David French of the National Retail Federation. “By executive fiat, the Department of Labor is effectively demoting millions of workers.”

Republican lawmakers, who are close to many of the industries that oppose the new rule, have vowed to block it during a mandated congressional review period.

With Donald J. Trump as their presumptive presidential nominee, however, the issue is fraught with risk for Republicans. Any attempt to repeal the regulation could exacerbate an already palpable split between Mr. Trump’s blue-collar supporters and the party’s establishment donors and politicians.

Paul Porter, a truck driver from Ava, Mo., who is a member of the Teamsters union and a supporter of Mr. Trump, said he already received time and a half after eight hours of work, but strongly favored the new overtime regulation. “I have friends who are managers who get taken advantage of terribly,” he said.

The administration, for its part, expressed confidence it was holding the better political hand. “I welcome a debate in Congress about wages in this country,” Thomas E. Perez, the secretary of labor, said. “It crystallizes the difference between this president and the leadership in Congress.”

Federal employment law provides two ways for most salaried workers to become eligible for overtime. The first is through a so-called duties test that essentially determines whether or not they are bona fide executives, administrators or professionals, which has historically meant spending most of their time exercising some decision-making authority. If not, they are supposed to be eligible for overtime pay. That method is open to interpretation.

The second is more of a hard-and-fast standard, setting a salary level to determine eligibility for overtime, regardless of duties. So even for employees who are legitimately managers, if their salary is below the cutoff, they must be paid overtime.

Certain categories of workers, like teachers, doctors and outside sales representatives, continue to be exempt from the regulation, though academics primarily engaged in research are not.

The overtime rule dates back to the passage of the 1938 law that established a federal minimum wage. The cutoff has been raised several times over the years. In 2004, the Bush administration also made it easier to exempt workers above the cutoff under the duties test.

Proponents like Mr. Eisenbrey urged the administration to raise the cutoff to about $51,000, which, in inflation-adjusted dollars, is roughly where it stood in 1975, when the Ford administration undertook the last major expansion of overtime eligibility.

In addition to increasing the basic ceiling, which will be set to match the pay of full-time salaried workers earning at the 40th percentile of salaries in the country’s lowest-income region, currently the South, the new regulation will be updated every three years to keep pace with changes in pay.

The Labor Department calculates that 4.2 million workers will become newly eligible for overtime. Other estimates put the number of newly eligible workers substantially higher.

In addition, according to the department, nearly nine million more workers who should already be eligible for overtime under the current duties test will be protected against being denied overtime illegally.

The most heated debate concerns the fate of those workers who are relatively far from the new cutoff. Critics argue that employers will simply lower the base wage for a majority of affected workers who work overtime, so that their overall pay, including overtime pay, will remain the same.

A projection by the consulting firm Oxford Economics, prepared for the National Retail Federation, predicted that a “disproportionate number of workers” who became eligible for overtime and worked more than 40 hours would “see their hourly rates decreased by an equal amount, leaving their total annual earnings unchanged.”

By contrast, Daniel Hamermesh, a labor economist at the Institute for the Study of Labor, predicted that base wages would fall somewhat over time, but that the higher overtime payments would more than offset any loss in regular salary levels.

The regulation, which President Obama directed the Labor Department to work on in 2014 and which the department first proposed last July, provoked a deluge of comments from the public — nearly 300,000 in all.

Many opponents argued that the new salary level would unfairly affect lower-wage regions of the country. The department decreased its proposed cutoff of $50,440 in response. It also changed its proposed annual indexing to once every three years, and decided against revisiting the 2004 changes to the duties test.

Groups representing colleges and universities, local governments, and smaller nonprofits also expressed concerns about the cost of the new regulation.

Elward Edd, an official at the Hopi Tribal Housing Authority in Arizona, which has a backlog of more than 500 homes to repair, said the burden of the new regulation would force him to scale back hiring to one construction crew from two.

Mr. Edd said he was not certain the new regulation would apply to his tribe, but planned to follow it until obtaining clarity. Labor Department officials said it would not.

Many critics argued that the need to closely monitor hours would impinge on workers’ freedom by preventing them from working as long as they like, and could damage an employee’s status and sense of self-worth.

But at least some of the likely beneficiaries of the new overtime rule took issue with the prediction of looming morale problems. “That is so out of touch,” said Erin Clark, a postdoctoral fellow at Brandeis University who spends about 60 hours a week doing research on neurons and makes $46,344 after having earned a Ph.D. from Harvard.

When the regulation goes into effect, Dr. Clark added, “it will at least feel like you’re out there in the job market with everyone else, on some sort of playing field, as opposed to this weird vestigial training position.”

the "music ministry" of today's church in so many ways is wrong. it needs to change. we spend too much money on lights and amps and soundboards and not enough on the poor. but the physical items of the stage are not really what's on my heart, it's the songs themselves.

so much of my youth in church was in hymns, even though rich mullins was one of our youth ministers. so, we had all his cool stuff that the radio played as well as all the cool stuff that the hebridean and azuza and brush arbors revivals wrote as well as the as well as the ones from time of the reformation.

i think the largest paradigm shift came somewhere around my time in youth group where it was still kinda "edgy" to play modern music. we were in the trenches on the front lines of the introduction of "pop" styles like "rock and roll" (God forbid) and it was all new.

and so little by little, as i went to church and attended, and finally became a youth minister i watched this whole thing grow and blossom from petra to d.c. talk, and it was fabulous... but i noticed one thing was missing: depth.

i think i must have noticed it for the first time in 1993 when i worked amy grant's: "heart in motion" concert. here was the famous/fabulous woman who had given so much music to her Lord and now she sang love songs? it was very upsetting to more people than the differences between elvis presley's first two albums...

but now, here we are with worldy bands like violent femmes, evanescence and u2 declaring loudly that they were never christian to begin with and our christian music declaring loudly that it is not worldly. that's like the beastie boys saying they were never a punk band. i read the lyrics to a lot of christian music and, hey, they could be talking about b'hai for all i know.

one thing i miss in the old world (as i guess i'm going to call it now) music is the mention of eternal promises and foundational teachings. things like the blood of the lamb, the new covenant, the gift of the Holy Spirit... a lot of these are simplified by (in order) "your love" and "your promise" and "your gifts". right. pretty vague.

but you can play it with slow dynamics and repetition and chord progressions that lift higher and higher and eventually end in a violin solo that brings all the folks to tears... that's what people want nowadays isn't it? not the meat of the word, but milk. isn't this what the apostle paul warned us of?

have we not read our bibles in so long that the things we hear from these stages in our modern buildings is actually uplifting? are we really that dumb to the actual meaning of a "worship service"? is our mind only our emotions and not our reason? is this "worship" or is it "brain washing"?

i feel like, in martin's book series: "song of ice and fire" there seems to be a lot of confusion on what god has what power. i mean, we've only seen a couple of miracles right? being brought back to life is the most common with melisandre and the white walkers...

but... we usually hear of "the seven" (the new gods) and "the old gods" which are just trees, by the way... then we heard of the lord of light! and he's been around a lot longer than any of the other ones... or has he? his real name is r'hllor but sometimes he's called the red god and is the actual god of heat and life.

the great other, who gives power to power to the white walkers is the god of ice and death. and these are the only real powers in the world with the exception of the god of death.

so there's the biggest yin-yang going on, but there's a larger pantheon. the biggest star here is: death. and many people worship him on essos.

the god of death is also called the many-faced god, the black goat and the lion of night in yi-ti and he's the only one worshiped in qohor... but oddly enough he is "the stranger" in the religion of the seven gods. he's got straight up churches, cults, cities and other places where he pops up now and again, and guess what? his other name is "the drowned god"... even among sailors who worship the merling king, he's even said to be a face of the many faced god.

so forget the trees or the great stallion or the great shepherd or even the entire religion of the seven with it's septs and sparrows... really there's only two gods in the entire world, with the many faced god wearing all sorts of disguises.

basically there's a GOOD and an EVIL.

syrio forel basically told it to us long ago. "there is only one god, and his name is death. but wait. arya said "yes" to him when she became one of his faces... basically she has become death.

this is something that i don't like, but martin planned it this way. that we would hate melisandre and love arya only to find out that melisandre serves a good guy and arya serves a bad guy.